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On Saturday, I ran the first Perl School session. Twenty-five programmers with little or no previous experience of Perl came along to Google Campus in London and listened to me talking about Perl.

Over six hours I tried to give a good introduction to Modern Perl. In the morning I talked about the core Perl language and explained some of the concepts (for example, context) where Perl differs from most other programming languages. In the afternoon I talked about some of the important big CPAN projects that are defining Modern Perl – things like Moose and PSGI.

The course was free as it was all a bit experimental. I was trying to work out how much material I could get through in a day and what topics would be most useful for the attendees. Many lessons were learned.

There was slightly too much in the course. Things got a little rushed towards the end. I might need to cut a bit of material before running it again. Or perhaps I just need to waffle on a bit less.

When you book a room you should ask how the seating will be configured. I turned up at about 9:15, expecting I’d just need to get to grips with the projector system. I found the room set up with chairs around a central table. It was a bit of a rush to turn that into a lecture theatre before the students arrived.

Some people don’t value free training. There were fifty places available on the course. They were all booked within 24 hours of the date being announced. Over the intervening couple of months, a few people dropped out and were replaced by people from the waiting list. That’s not a problem. In the 24 hours before the course I received five emails from people saying that they couldn’t come for various reasons. That’s not a problem either. What’s a problem is the twenty or so people who just didn’t bother to turn up and didn’t think it worthwhile to let me know.

And I’m planning more courses for the future. Initially, I plan to run something every couple of months. I’m thinking about one-day courses in Database Programming, Object Oriented Programming and Web Programming. Hopefully some of my readers will be interested to come along to some of that.

I hope to announce the subject and date of another course within a couple of weeks. It’ll probably be in early December. Watch the web site or the mailing list for details as soon as I have them.

I’m planning to run a series of these low cost, high attendance courses. And I’m going to brand them as “Perl School”. The idea[1] is to get a bit of a buzz going about Perl training in London. And giving the series an easy to remember name is an important part of that.

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Back in 2007 the London Perl Mongers ran a free one-day Perl training course at the BBC’s offices in White City. That was five years ago, so for a couple of months I’ve been thinking that it was probably about time that we did another one.

And then suddenly this afternoon a few loose ends came together and all of a sudden it’s been organised.

The course will be on Saturday 4th August at Google Campus in London. It will run from 9am to 5pm. As last time, it will be completely free to attendees.

Last time the course was aimed at intermediate Perl programmers and introduced them to advanced Perl techniques. This time I’m aiming at the opposite of the spectrum. The course is called “Modern Perl for Non-Perl Programmers”. It’s aimed at people who are comfortable programming in languages other than Perl and who are interested in getting up to speed in Perl as quickly as possible.

Obviously most of the readers of this blog won’t be in the target audience for the course, but I’m betting that you all know at least one person who might be interested in the course. So it would be great if you could send the link to the registration page to anyone who you think would find the course useful.

Those lovely people at O’Reilly have put an advert for the courses in the new issue of Linux Format which hits the shops about now. That’s issue 154 and the advert is on page 54. The advert contains details of a competition where two people can win free places on the two courses – one person on each course.

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I’ll be running some public training courses in London in February. There will be two two-day courses (which include practical sessions). The intermediate course will be on Feb 21/22 and the advanced course will be running on Feb 23/24. The courses will be held at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square.

For more details (including the syllabus and prices) please see my training page.

There are plenty of unfilled Perl jobs in London currently. I’m constantly getting recruiters phoning or emailing me asking for help finding suitable candidates. If you’ve done a bit of Perl in the past, but left it for other technologies, now would be a good time to rekindle your interest and these would be good courses to take (but, of course, I would say that, wouldn’t I!)

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The London Perl Workshop is in two weeks time. Have you registered yet? There are apparently 200 people signed up already.

I’m going to be there giving a training course in the morning. It’s called Modern Core Perl and it will introduce many of the new features that have been added to the Perl core since version 5.10.

The course is ninety minutes long and attendance is completely free (as it is for all of the workshop). I was planning to write a post encouraging people to sign-up for the course, but it seems that will be unnecessary. I already have twenty people signed up and until I know for sure how big the room is I’ve had to declare the class full as I don’t want to run the risk of people signing up and not being able to fit into the room.

Unfortunately, though, the workshop web site doesn’t really have the concept of signing up for courses. So it’s impossible to actually stop more people signing up for the course. In fact, two more people have signed up since I edited the description to say the course was full.

I hope that the room will be large enough to allow us to let a few more people in on the day, but we will be strict on not overcrowding the room.

I apologise in advance if you want to come to the course but can’t get in. Perhaps you’ll consider Ian’s course instead. Or there will be three or four tracks of other talks going on at the same time.

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Been a while since I’ve had time to post anything here, but I’ve just got time for three quick announcements.

1/ Last week I ran some public training courses. I’ve just put the slides online.

2/ There’s a London.pm technical meeting in two weeks time. It’s at Net-A-Porter (above the Westfield shopping centre) on October March 10th. A good line-up of talks. If you’re interested, please sign up.

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The training courses for this summer’s YAPC in Pisa have been announced. And my course on Modern Perl has been chosen. It’s a one-day course on August 2th (just before the conference). It costs € 180. You’ll be able to book once the payments system on the conference web site goes live.

Here’s the description of the course from the YAPC site:

This course introduces the major building blocks of modern Perl. We’ll be looking at a number of CPAN modules that can make your Perl programming life far more productive.

The major tools that we will cover will be:

Template Toolkit

DBIx::Class

Moose

Catalyst

Plack

We’ll also look at some other modules including autodie, DateTime and TryCatch.

There are several other good courses running both before and after the conference. I’m sure there’ll be something that you’ll find interesting.